


Looking Backward (The McFly Continuum)

by Kleenexwoman



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 01:47:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5438960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kleenexwoman/pseuds/Kleenexwoman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An interview with the man who built the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking Backward (The McFly Continuum)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Steelneko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steelneko/gifts).



_"It was about the money at first. But now it's about the future."_

_I can't help but think that it's the linchpin of Marty McFly's philosophy. Most people have heard his name in passing, but only his hometown and the most esoteric tech bloggers still recognize his face. He was one of the crop of teenaged prodigies who made the news in the 1980s, one of the most influential entrepreneurs of the 1990s, and one of the most effortless recluses of the new millenium. But in September 2015, he finally acquiesced to OMNI magazine's endless pleading for an interview. And on October 28th, 2015, I found myself sipping a tall glass of Pepsi Perfect on his couch in the quietly manicured Hilldale neighborhood of his hometown, Hill Valley._

_Most people don't know where Hill Valley is, much less that Mr. McFly calls it his home. It's still a small town, full of quaint family-owned businesses, posters and holo-ads for local politicians and events, and retro mid-century homes. The pace of life seems unhurried, no matter how many teenagers scoot by on hoverboards or how many holographic sharks snap at you from the local theater. You'd imagine that Hill Valley's most famous son might have the biggest house in town, something overlooking the entire city. But the McFly manor is a split-level bungalow like any other, comfortably anonymous. Inside, the decor is homey. Framed posters of old rock bands vie for wall space with photos of the McFly family and of Hill Valley in days past._

_Marty McFly is dressed casually in a Wyld Stallyns T-shirt and his sister Linda McFly's iconic Inside-Out designer jeans. He may be dressed like a teenager and have the youthful skin of someone who visits Hill Valley's rejuvenation clinic regularly, but the first thing I notice about his face is that his eyes seem very old. There's nothing I can really pin this impression on, no crow's feet or even the hunched shoulders of decades. But he seems happy and easy in his life, lounging with a bottle of Vitamin Water on an easy chair across from me._

**I didn't expect you to live somewhere like this. I thought you'd live in some kind of high-tech compound.**

Nah. You know who lives in places like that? Bad guys. I've lived in Hill Valley all my life, and the last thing I need is to look down at it from a tower or something. Everybody knows me here. They don't know me as the guy who invented the cell phone--they know me as Marty, the guy who skateboards to work like he's still a kid.

**So, despite inventing the hoverboard, you don't own one yourself?**

I've got one stuffed in my closet for if I can't use my old board. But I like the feeling of really being connected with the road. I even go out on the weekends with my kids and run around in the desert in my 4x4. It's part of the fun. Of course, I've got the Tannen Carburetor in there, so it gets about 600 miles on a gallon of natural gas. 

**Now, there was some kind of controversy over your ownership of the Tannen Carburetor when it went on the market, wasn't there?**

Ohh, I kinda wish you hadn't brought that up. See, the guy's always just been kind of--uh, I don't wanna come off like a jerk in a magazine. He had never struck me as the kind of guy to have new ideas, you know? But I guess I underestimated him. So he comes to me around, oh, July of 1990 and says, "Hey, McFly, I hear your company's doing real good. I got something that's gonna make you a lot of money." 

And I say, "Yeah, Biff, how you gonna do that?" 

So he says, "Well, I was messin' around in the garage, and I came up with this carburetor that gets about six hundred miles to the gallon. I stuck it right into Sheila and I haven't had to fill 'er up for three months." Sheila was his car, by the way. Just so that's clear. 

I say, "S'pose I don't believe you, Biff." 

So he says, "You don't believe me? I'll show you. Let's go to Vegas, kid." 

He drains the gas tank and I put in a single gallon of gas myself, and--well, we went to Vegas. From my garage to the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, it's just a little under six hundred miles. We get 595 on the odometer by the time he tosses the keys to some valet and tells the kid he'll kick his ass if he finds a single scratch on his girl...and the needle's in the red. Incredible. Now I'd just really gotten going on FlyCo around that time--I wasn't running it out of Doc Brown's old garage anymore, I'd actually rented some office space downtown. I was even thinking about hiring someone besides my brother. So I told him that either I'd pay him a thousand bucks right then for the design and we'd split the proceeds fifty-fifty afterwards--which was kind of what I came up with on the spot, 'cause I'd never actually had someone come to me with something like that before. 

And he says, "Hell, kid, a thousand bucks ain't gonna square me with Vinnie the Chin." 

So it turns out that since Biff is saving so much money on gas, he drives down to Vegas on the weekends and spends that money on showgirls and poker. Classy guy. And he had a losing streak in the wrong casino, almost got his fingers broke. Real tragic. He needs ten thousand, pronto, or his grandma's gonna end up on the streets and the Mob is gonna be running his garage in Hill Valley. Well, obviously I can't let his grandma end up on the streets. And besides, I happen to have...let's call it a hunch...that this carburetor is a good investment. So I tell him, "Okay, ten thousand and it's mine, flat out. No royalties." Now, this was actually almost all the money I had. So I write him a check, he cashes it, and off he goes to pay Vinnie the Chin. I get him another gallon of gas, thank my lucky stars he's not in the mood to pick up showgirls, and off we go. Next month, I'm watching CNN, turns out the United States has just invaded Kuwait. So I call my friend Dave Lightman, who's the youngest person to ever work at the Pentagon, and he makes some calls-- 

**Do you mean the David Lightman who was involved with the nuclear situation in 1983?**

Yeah, that Dave Lightman. We met at Pacific Tech. 

**I was under the impression that you were self-educated--when did you attend Pacific Tech?**

Oh, no, I never actually went to school there. I played a gig with the Pinheads at this, uh, they said it was frat party, but it was just full of these...these _geeks_ , and they'd set up this incredible laser effects system that wasn't like anything I'd seen before. It was great. It turned out that they actually didn't care about the music. The guy who'd booked us actually wanted to talk to me about the fuzzy logic feedback amp I'd built--he'd seen me use it at a basement show in Sacramento when we were opening for the Serpent Men. That's kind of when everything started. Winter break, 1985. 

**So you started with musical equipment.**

It was the first thing I really cared about messing around with. I always wanted to be a rock 'n' roll star. I even made a demo tape and sent it out to a bunch of companies, but nobody ever wanted to sign the Pinheads. They wanted the amp, though. 

**What happened to the amplifier?**

Well, I had a few offers for the design. I, uh, realized I had to think about the future, though, and if I just sold the rights to it I didn't think it was going to do much good for me, in the long run. So I just started making amps. Everyone wanted one. David Byrne bought three. Mark Mothersbaugh bought five. I wasn't satisfied with just making amplifiers, though, and I didn't just want to go into making recording equipment. I knew I could do better. 

**And that's when you began the first open file-sharing network, FlySter.**

Oh no, no, come on. It wasn't just the file-sharing network. It was the conversion program, and it was the FlyMan, and they were all part of the same package. I didn't charge for access to FlySter and I didn't even put music up on there. I let the users do it. All I sold was the conversion package and the FlyMan, so you could convert your vinyl or tapes or whatever to the FP3 files and listen to 'em anywhere. It was the future. 

**It made you rich.**

Nah, it made me famous. I wasn't making that much of a profit on the FlySters, and about 90% of the conversion programs anyone was using were pirated. But I got on the cover of the Rolling Stone, and that was pretty exciting. Huey Lewis and the News wrote a song about me, which was probably one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me. It made me realize that I was really going someplace--but I wasn't really sure where that would be. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to make a fortune and hang out with supermodels and drive a huge car. And then I realized, wait, some of the most miserable jerks I've ever known have been rich. Do I want a good future for my kids? Yeah, I do, and I want to make sure they have every advantage in life. But I didn't need to try to get rich. It was about the money at first, but now it's about the future. 

**What changed your mind?**

It wasn't an overnight decision, don't get me wrong. After I got a government contract for the Tannen Carburetor--which is now in every single registered car in the United States--I moved to Los Angeles and lived in a penthouse for three years. Those were the worst three years of my life. I broke up with Jennifer, got heatstroke, and almost got shot at a Whammy Burger. I thought I was going to die eating French fries. There are a lot of weird things going on in Hill Valley, but at least the people who try to kill you in diners are people who know you. Usually. 

**Usually, huh?**

I didn't belong in Los Angeles. I didn't have a good future there. I thought I did, or at least I had to try it and see--because I never thought I'd have that great of a future in Hill Valley. I mean, the future is chaotic. You have to keep checking up on it. I think I kind of had to spend that much time there to really appreciate what I had in Hill Valley, though. 

**You're talking about your predictive AI algorithms, aren't you?**

Yeah. Yeah--that's exactly what I'm talking about. I got back in touch with Dave Lightman around 1998, and we started putting a lot of attention into a project for predictive national security algorithms that we presented to President Nader in early 2001. And even more changed after that. I almost didn't recognize my future. 

**You credited the birth of your children with your move back to Hill Valley, and your subsequent isolation.**

I always knew I was going to have kids, but I didn't know--I didn't know what it was going to be like. I was still living in Los Angeles and just hating my life and thinking that it was going to get better any day, but not really sure how to make that happen. Jennifer came back to visit me, and--well, we had kind of a crazy night. Three months later, she calls me and she tells me that she's pregnant. We had this shotgun wedding in the Chapel of Love, and that's when I started to panic. I had to do more. So...I looked towards the future again. I thought about what was going to happen. 

**Using those predictive algorithms, of course.**

That's--that's--yeah, that's exactly how I did it. Algorithms. Right. Uh...so Jennifer had twins, and I thought for sure it was going to be a boy and a girl, but it was a boy and a boy. We named them Marty and Calvin. So that was interesting. Then fifteen years later, Cal finally tells us she's Marlene, and I don't think she ever expected me to say what I did. 

**What did you say?**

I said, "I knew I was gonna have a girl someday! I didn't think that'd be how, but I knew it." Anyway, that's when I started investing in bioscience stuff. Now we've got this experimental rejuvenation clinic in Hill Valley, and they're doing great stuff with hormone replacement and facial restructuring. But it's not quite as far along as I'd like it to be. By now I thought we'd have total rejuvenation. But...nope. I mean, I tried. I did. But I guess sometimes there are trade-offs that you don't see until it's too late. I mean...I can't fix everything. 

**It sounds like you feel personally responsible for that.**

I feel personally responsible for a lot. Well, I am personally responsible for a lot. Like, the FlyPhone. I introduced that years before--uh, before. Before... 

**Before what?**

Before anyone else really had the idea, I guess. But the problem is that things just aren't being invented fast enough. See, we have all of these problems, and then we we invent stuff to solve them--but only after they happen. So the trick is to bring these ideas into the world before the problem actually gets bad enough to end things. That's FlyCorp's philosophy. Fly ahead. Solve the problems of the future before they happen. I can see the future becoming better and better, and the end of the world receding, but it's so slow. We can buy ourselves a year or two at a time. And that's a year or two of my life. It isn't fast enough. 

**It sounds like you have some kind of...timetable, for this stuff?**

You know, there's always something dangerous just waiting in the wings. Okay, so I perfected localized weather control. Well--not perfected. Sometimes the rain is a minute off. But it's allowed us to completely reroute the course of hurricanes so nobody gets flooded, right? Except that people are still going to die underwater in about a half a century because we still can't fix the hole in the ozone layer. Once you prevent one, it's hard to stop, because you realize what you can do. And then you can't do anything else. 

**So you're trying to solve problems before they happen--**

Like the Mr. Fusion. Do you know about peak oil? I did. It's the point where there's nowhere to go but down with the world's oil production, where we've reached the limit of what we can really produce, and we have to start looking for alternatives. Now, not only do we not have to worry about peak oil because there's a Mr. Fusion in every new car and in every new home--and a lot of old ones are being retrofitted as we're able to bring the price of the fusion units down--but we're reclaiming huge amounts of trash by turning them into energy. It's the perfect solution. But even that's not enough, you know? 

**And this is all due to your predictive algorithm?**

Look, the algorithm is--it's not what it's cracked up to be. It's meant to simulate large-scale stress points and chaos vectors, and it does that. It gives me a few numbers and graphs and stuff to show to people. Once I unveil Project Brown next year, we won't need the algorithm anymore. I won't need to invent anything else, actually. So it'll be my last invention, and then I'll retire. 

**What's Project Brown?**

It's named after Doc Brown. That's all I can say about it right now. He was my best friend for years, and he left me his garage to work in. I ran FlyCorp out of his garage for a really long time, until I turned it into the Hill Valley Museum of Technology. Of course, his old notes and stuff are--well, he wanted me to destroy his stuff, so nobody else could use it. I did leave his breakfast machine in there, though. People just had to see the breakfast machine. 

**And Project Brown is...**

It's amazing. And it's going to ruin my reputation. But it's going to let people keep doing what I've been doing. I mean, I could keep this under wraps, you know, let everyone think I'm still the world's greatest genius until I die. But I can't do that. I've done this for too long, and I want to spend time with my kids. I want to be there for them, because you never really know what the future might bring. You can't control everything, no matter how hard you try. And, uh, I think that's all. 

**Thank you, Mr. McFly.**

Thank you guys. You know, the reason I wanted to give OMNI this interview is is because you guys published my dad's first story. "Spaceman from Pluto." You accepted it the very first time he submitted it anywhere, and he still talks about that--he says that he doesn't know if he'd have had the courage to keep writing if you hadn't. And, uh, he wrote "Exit to Mars" and "Dawn on the Red Planet," which sparked interest in the Mars colonization program, which I didn't expect. But I like the whole Mars colony thing. 

_At that point, it became clear that the interview was over. However, I did stay in that residence for another half hour, admiring Mrs. McFly's tri-layer garden and listening to Marty play "Johnny B. Goode" on his Fender guitar. "And to think," he told me, grinning, "if things turned out how I wanted, I coulda been in a rock 'n' roll band."_


End file.
